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Walgreens eyes loophole end run around taxes

DIXON, Ill.—While the Walgreens drug store chain has proudly touted itself as "the pharmacy America trusts," many here in this small river town where the founder of the company got his start complain that

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Walgreens eyes loophole end run around taxes

James Burke, mayor of Dixon, Ill., fields a phone call as he visits the grave of Charles R. Walgreen, the founder of the Walgreen Company, at the Oakwood Cemetery in Dixon on July 24.(Photo: Alyssa L Schukar for USA TODAY)

But many here in this small river town where the founder of the company got his start complain that the drugstore chain is on the precipice of turning its back on the USA.

Walgreens, the USA's largest drugstore chain, with more than 8,500 stores, soon will decide whether to take advantage of a loophole in U.S. tax law that would allow it to save billions of dollars by moving its headquarters to Europe, where it is on the verge of acquiring controlling interest in Alliance Boots, a Swiss-based company that operates drugstores in Britain.

From the shareholders' perspective, making the move is a no-brainer: It could save the company roughly $4 billion over the next five years.

But here in this town of 16,000 where just about everybody can tell you about company founder Charles Walgreen's impact on the community, such a move seems out of step with how the Walgreen family conducted business.

"I think he'd be rolling in his grave if he knew what was going on today," says Bill Jones, who runs the Northwest Territory Historic Center in Dixon and worked closely with the Walgreen family on building an exhibit at the museum honoring the founder.

The loophole is known as tax inversion, a controversial tactic that allows a company that does most of its business in the USA to cut its federal tax bill by merging or buying an overseas company in a lower-tax country and then nominally relocating its headquarters there.

Despite years of on-and-off efforts by lawmakers in Washington and the IRS to close the loophole, dozens of American companies have used it — several in recent months.

The first corporate inversion to capture attention occurred in 1982, when oil-and-gas company McDermott moved its headquarters to Panama. It wasn't until 1994, after cosmetics company Helen of Troy moved to Bermuda, that the IRS raised concerns that such restructurings were motivated by the desire to dodge taxes.

This year alone, eight major U.S. companies — including AbbVie, Medtronic and Mylan — have announced plans to shift their headquarters overseas in an effort to trim their corporate tax rate, which hovers around 35% in the U.S. and is among the highest in the world.

Last week, President Obama called inversion an "unpatriotic tax loophole" and pressed Congress to pass legislation to stem the flow of corporations that are effectively renouncing their U.S. citizenship. Inversion could cost the Treasury nearly $19.5 billion over the next decade, according to Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation.

Analysts say perhaps no company with a Main Street profile that matches Walgreens' — the country's largest pharmaceutical chain, with $72 billion in annual sales — has used the loophole, and Walgreens' pending decision is bringing unprecedented attention to the issue.

"I don't know how this inversion doesn't happen," says Christopher Geier, of the Chicago-based investment banking firm Sikich. "They'll get some bad press, but I don't see a big enough reaction from consumers on this to change where this appears to be heading."

IN DIXON, IT's PERSONAL

Two sites important to the Walgreens family are seen on West 1st Street in Dixon, Illinois. The building at right was formerly a Dixon National Bank, which Charles R. Walgreen saved from closing, and the building at center under the green awning was the first pharmacy where he worked.(Photo: Alyssa L Schukar for USA TODAY)

Here in Dixon, the talk of Walgreens moving to Switzerland resonates in a personal way.

Charles Walgreen moved to Dixon as a teenager and got his start in the business working at a pharmacy, a job he took after injuring himself working at a shoe factory in town. Residents here recall Walgreen taking Boy Scouts up on his Sikorsky S-38 amphibian aircraft, which he would fly back and forth from the Chicago area and land on the Rock River, near the family's estate here.

As a young man, he moved to Chicago to seek his fortunes and eventually started his drugstore chain. But he opened his second pharmacy here in his adopted hometown — where he became revered as the city's second-favorite son. (President Ronald Reagan, who grew up here and caddied for Walgreen at the Timber Creek Country Club, is Dixon's most celebrated hometown boy.)

Walgreen, who died in 1939, saved the Dixon National Bank from going out of business during the Great Depression. The family also led fundraising for a statute erected in 1930 along the Rock River depicting a young volunteer named Abraham Lincoln, who spent time here during the Black Hawk War.

Charles Walgreen Jr., the founder's son, won the bid during World War II to open a store at the newly built Pentagon by giving all store profits to the Pentagon Post Restaurant Council, which supervised food service in the complex.

"Walgreens' attitude was so patriotically generous that no competitor could possibly better it," declared a weekly publication from the War Department.

Myrtle Walgreen, the wife of the company's founder, also was a good friend of the people of Dixon. James Burke, Dixon's mayor, says legend has it that at one of the regular coffee klatches at Dixon's Walgreens, she offered an extraordinary stock tip to some of the city's most prominent citizens.

"She told them we are getting ready to introduce a new line of product that you might consider investing in," says Burke, who has called on Walgreens to ditch the tax inversion plan. "That product was the tampon."

Larry Dunphy, who owns an independent bookstore in Dixon, says he takes pride in buying stocks in Illinois companies such as McDonald's, John Deere and Walgreens. But he says he's told his financial adviser to dump his stock in Walgreens and buy CVS if the company goes through with the inversion.

In the end, Dunphy says the public outcry may not have an impact on Walgreens' decision, but it could have a long-term effect on how companies approach inversion in the future and spur Congress to change laws to give companies an incentive to stay put.

"Will there be enough people who go to CVS or the local pharmacy that will offset the $4 billion that Walgreens will make by moving?" Dunphy says. "Maybe not. But I hope the damage this is doing to Walgreens' image is something that companies in the future will consider before moving to cut their share of taxes."

Walgreens CEO Gregory Wasson, who, along with his board, has come under intense pressure from shareholders to move the headquarters to Switzerland, says the company will decide soon whether to move its headquarters.

Early in 2014, Wasson said publicly that an inversion wasn't under consideration. The Deerfield, Ill., company bought 45% of Switzerland-based Alliance Boots in 2012 and has an option to buy the rest of the company next year, which would create the opportunity to make the move.

But after a private meeting in France with a shareholder group — including Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and hedge funds Jana Partners, Corvex and Och-Ziff — Wasson began to change his tune.

He made clear in a call with Wall Street analysts last month that an inversion was very much a possibility as Walgreens restructures the company ahead of completing the Alliance Boots deal.

Michael Polzin, a company spokesman, says Walgreens will do "what is in the best long-term interests of our customers, employees and shareholders."

Polzin won't comment about the impact a tax inversion would have on the company's image. The company also declined to make Kevin Walgreen, the great-grandson of the company's founder and the only member Walgreen family currently involved in day-to-day operations, available for an interview.

"Whether we do an inversion or not, we're still going to pay over $2 billion a year in federal, state, employer and property taxes," Polzin says. "We will still be one of the top job providers in America, with roughly 250,000 employees. We're going to continue to make capital investments in the U.S. and expand our business here for decades to come."

That argument hasn't assuaged some Illinois lawmakers.

In a letter to Walgreens' board of directors this week, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., warned that the company was in danger of sullying its reputation as a community-minded corporation. She also sought to remind the Walgreens board that roughly a quarter of its $2.5 billion in profits last year were directly connected to federal programs — such as Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

"Everywhere you look, the success of Walgreens is tied to the opportunities it has been afforded by this country," she wrote. "To benefit from those resources and then to refuse to pay your fair share of taxes needed to fund them is inexcusable."

In a separate letter, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., took a shot at Walgreens' folksy motto. "Is 'the corner of happy and healthy' somewhere in the Swiss Alps?" Durbin wrote. He added, "I believe you will find that your customers are deeply patriotic and will not support Walgreens' decision to turn its back on the United States."

On Tuesday, Durbin and three other Democratic lawmakers introduced a bill that would withhold government contracts from companies that conduct inversions. The legislation, which faces long odds for becoming law, was co-sponsored by Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Lloyd Doggett of Texas. The proposal would also give federal agencies discretion to stop doing business with companies that subcontract to such businesses.

Burke, the Dixon mayor, says he hopes Walgreens will stay put. But if it pushes ahead with the inversion, Burke notes there are three other drugstores in his town.

"I think Walgreens will see that a lot of Americans will take their business elsewhere," Burke says. "At some point, how much profit is enough?"